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1 Introduction “You cannot live this way forever,” Manuela grumbled in a low-pitched voice, almost whispering to herself. Manuela, a gorgeous Argentine tango instructor in her late twenties, had been in job-hopping mode for the past couple of years, eager to pay the symbolic dues that global cities like New York charge newcomers in the artistic field.1 She was fighting a cold on that nippy Friday morning of December 2001, when we got together for coffee in a fast-food venue in Midtown, before she had to rush to teach her first class at a dancing studio nearby. With the financial downturn that followed the terrorist strikes of September 11, 2001, it had become more difficult for tango instructors to woo potential students into taking dancing lessons. The milongas (tango parlors) that Manuela and her friends frequented were less populated than ever before. Two of Manuela’s students had decided not to take private classes with her anymore, and with that decision, her chances of paying the rent on her studio that month had vanished. Again, Manuela vented: “I don’t see the way for anybody to give me a real visa that will pay for the rent and groceries.” By a real visa, she was actually referring to having a job en blanco (declared employment) that would eventually make her eligible for a renewable work permit. This would give her the needed financial stability that she had been recurrently denied by the flurry of short-term and unstable paychecks, which came and went depending on the capricious mood of occasional students or the weather forecast. The last piece of gloomy news she shared with me on that day was that several of her outdoor performances had been canceled 2 • More Than Two to Tango due to a series of disastrous weekends in which rain had been a steady, albeit uninvited, guest. When I bumped into Manuela less than a year later, her situation had taken a turn for the better. Tango dancing was blossoming in the city once again, and she had finally been able to secure a temporary visa as a journalist , thanks to her occasional written collaborations to tango magazines in Argentina, for which she rarely got paid. This also meant that she taught tango mostly off the books for an income that was way below market values . However, with the help of her tango friends, she was in the process of applying for an artist visa and was hopeful about gaining a more permanent legal presence in the city. Manuela’s account is just one of the many stories that I have heard for more than a decade now, and it clearly portrays the struggles that a tango artist usually endures in order to make a living in the field. By the late 1990s, the Manhattan tango world was already turning into a booming market on its own, supported by the rising popularity of tango dancing and music playing. In recent years, large numbers of Argentine tango performers have come to New York City, either as occasional visitors or prospective settlers, hoping to satisfy the increasing demand stemming from the offerings of tango products, including the opening of tango salons and novel tango shows. How are they able to maneuver their often volatile working and housing conditions while trying to launch and support their artistic careers? How do they provide for basic necessities, including medical care when needed? And, more important, how are tango artists able to resourcefully utilize their seemingly fragile and transient social webs in order to make ends meet? These questions haunted me in those days, as well as today, as I marveled at the resourceful abilities and social assets marshaled by tango artists in their attempts to earn a decent living in one of the most competitive and expensive cities in the world. In El Cantor de Tango (The Tango Singer), one of the last novels by the late Argentine writer Tomás Eloy Martínez (2004), the author chronicles the adventures of a young American university student who travels to Buenos Aires in search of a mythical male tango interpreter. The student’s voice weaves a path in which his endless pursuit for the cantor becomes a striking reflection of his own migratory journey. In this book, I mirror that search—only the other way around—for the purpose of exploring the lives of tango dancers, singers, and musicians in New York City. As in Mart ínez’s...

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